Entertainment

Tom Petty, American rock 'n' roll everyman, dead at 66

9:07 p.m. PT UPDATE: Tom Petty's manager announced that the singer has died.

Tom Petty, the gaunt, unassuming rocker with the sly grin, sleepy demeanor and biting voice whose decades of American rock 'n' roll hitmaking put him among the best-selling music artists of all time, has died, his manager announced Monday night. He was 66.

"He suffered cardiac arrest at his home in Malibu in the early hours of this morning and was taken to UCLA Medical Center but could not be revived," Tony Dimitriades, his longtime manager, said in a statement.

TMZ first reported Monday that Petty was found unresponsive late Sunday night at his Malibu home, and though emergency responders got a pulse, he had no brain activity and was removed from life support after arriving at UCLA Santa Monica Hospital.

There was confusion earlier Monday after CBS News reported that Petty had died, citing Los Angeles Police Department sources. But the LAPD later tweeted that the information had been released inadvertently, and TMZ updated its post to say he was still clinging to life but "is not expected to live through the day."

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers had just wrapped their 40th Anniversary tour in Los Angeles last Monday, by all accounts a rip-roaring swan song that Petty himself predicted would probably be their last. It was the end of a remarkably consistent, sustained and critically acclaimed career that just kept building and never really slowed down.

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers at the RBC Bluesfest on July 16 in Ottawa, Canada.

Image: Mark Horton/Getty Images for ABA

Petty dropped out of high school in the late 1960s to focus on his Gainesville, Florida-based band — first called The Epics, which Petty said was too corny, so they changed it to Mudcrutch — but it was his band Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers that finally broke through with "Breakdown," the biggest hit from their 1976 self-titled album.

Petty made more than a dozen albums with the Heartbreakers, a collaboration that spanned five decades and produced such monster radio hits as "American Girl," "Refugee" and "Don't Come Around Here No More."

But his peak commercial moment was his solo debut, the 1989 album Full Moon Fever, which utterly dominated radio for more than a year with huge hits "Free Fallin'," "Won't Back Down" and "Runnin' Down a Dream."

At a time when classic rock was beginning to show its age, Full Moon Fever felt fresh immediate, reinvigorating a genre that's still a major force in concert-ticket sales and FM radio.

Petty was also central in the 1980s supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, featuring pals Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. Superstars, all of them, but Petty was somehow the glue, the easygoing natural leader that he was, and it was his sharp and serrated voice taking the verses on that group's biggest hit, "The End of the Line."

With more than 80 million records sold, Petty ranks among the top 100 best-selling music artists of all time — all the more remarkable in that he didn't rely on flashy clothes, an outrageous persona or particularly innovative musical stylings to get there. His stripped-down Rickenbacker guitar sound, punkish rhythms and all-American themes .

(OK, there was that one exception — "Don't Come Around Here No More," which was a truly weird and wonderful song and video.)

But all that is really just a testament to the fundamentally sound songwriting, and a little bit of luck: Petty was still knocking around Florida when he attracted the bulk of who would eventually be the Heartbreakers — "two of the best musicians I'd ever met just wandered into my life," he once said — guys who, as bands formed and collapsed and re-formed around them, would happily hang with Petty for life.

Petty took off for Los Angeles in the '70s with little more than a demo and a dream, and within days had multiple record-deal offers. He went back to Gainsville to gather up the band; they all sold their possessions, pooled their money and headed to LA with about a month's worth of living expenses.

But Mudcrutch wasn't working out, and with a couple of personnel changes, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' lineup was set. Soon "Breakdown" was on the radio, and the next 40 years would be spent runnin' down a dream.

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